Richard is difficult to understand psychologically because, while he is clearly pwer-hungry and sadistic, the deep-rooted motivations for his malevolent hatred are hard to pinpoint. Some critics feel that Richard is not really a fully developed character in the way that Shakespeare's later characters, such as Macbeth or Hamlet, are. Such critics argue that Richard does not possess a complex human psychology but instead recalls a stock character from early medieval drama. Like the "Vice" …
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showed last 75 words of 2771 total
…d several times throughout the play to represent him, most notably in Stanley's dream about Hastings's death. The idea of the boar is also played on in describing Richard's deformity, and Richard is cursed by the duchess as an "abortive, rooting hog" (I.iii.225). The boar was one of the most dangerous animals that people hunted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and Shakespeare's audience would have associated it with untamed aggression and uncontrollable violence